Kyle Kellams: Filmland, the Arkansas Cinema Society's annual celebration of Arkansas' contemporary connection to movies begins tomorrow in Little Rock.
Thursday night, a preview screening of The Threesome will give people a chance to see a movie filmed in Little Rock and set in the city as well. When three friends spend a night together, the long-lasting results have life-changing effects. Imagine a romantic comedy with higher stakes.
Chad Hartigan directed The Threesome, and he says setting the right tone for a film in which actors have to explore a wide range of emotions and actions is incredibly important.
Hartigan: I think it matters in the sense that you have to know what movie you're trying to make, because if you can't get everybody on board making the same movie, then you're not going to have a successful outcome. So you do talk about tone a lot as one of the things in prep, just trying to make sure everybody knows what we're trying to accomplish here. And with this movie in particular, we wanted it to be genuinely romantic and funny and tender and sincere and emotional. And so, yeah, people needed to know that there's a limit to how broad you can make it. There's a limit to how sad you can go. We were building these sort of guardrails, guardrails that we needed to operate within. And so yeah, you talk about it a lot.
I don't want to give too much away. There are characters who spend a night together. There are ramifications that are life-altering. And so the film has to change tone sometimes. There are some very emotional moments in that.
Kellams: I imagine this is like other films where you film out of sequence. That's asking a lot of actors — you've got to drop in and be this way or that way.
Hartigan: Yes, it really is. I mean, even without spoiling anything, the movie's called The Threesome, and there is a threesome scene in it. Just asking actors to make out for six hours a day is crazy. I'd never done a scene quite so extensive as that, involving kissing. And you just realize these guys have been doing it for six hours. That's to say nothing of actual emotional scenes and pulling up deep feelings and selling, reacting to life-altering situations, as you said. Luckily they're pros. I don't know how they do it, but they do it. And my job is just to be there to facilitate the environment that allows them to do it as easily as possible.
Kellams: There is a scene in the last third of the film at a hospital. It's when a lot of characters come together. It made me laugh out loud. You've got realizations happening. As the audience, you're sort of omnipotent — you see it developing before it develops. Is that a fun sequence to work on?
Hartigan: Yeah, that was both the most fun and the most challenging because we had, I think, nine main characters in this movie. It's by far the largest cast I've ever worked with. Obviously there's our main three that are the leads, but there's a big supporting cast that all play significant parts. And of the nine, eight of them are involved in that sequence.
We shot it over two days, and it was just really fun to have all eight actors there at the same time and feeling like, oh, that's the first time it really felt more like a stage production where you have everybody and you get to rehearse together. But at the same time, that made it the most difficult, too, because it involves a little bit of a scuffle and you have to figure out what each individual person of the eight is going to be doing and how it's going to fit into the whole. And how are you going to film just their section? So it really does take the entire two days to film what happens in the movie for about 30-40 seconds. Very challenging, but also the most fun.
And there are two very small moments in that 30- to 40-second sequence that just make you laugh out loud. One is a line delivered by Julia Sweeney, which is just hilarious. And then there's another where one character leans into the frame and observes what is happening out in the hall, this sort of fracas. And it's just perfect.
Kellams: When did you know that was how it was going to be framed?
Hartigan: I think I set a challenge for myself in the beginning of making this movie that I wanted to try and find humor as the filmmaker, not necessarily rely always on the dialogue, but how can we find humor with what the camera is doing, or what the blocking is, or the entrances and exits — some physical comedy.
And so that was an instance where we were trying to figure out what's this one character of the eight going to be doing? He's probably just going to be sitting there, but let's give him something fun to do. And so we came up with this idea of him poking his head into the frame because that's an actor that I knew personally as a friend before this project. And I knew that sort of comedy fits into his wheelhouse. A lot of his other stuff is improvised — his Marlon Brando impression earlier in that scene was improvised by him. I hired him knowing that he would be bringing a lot of funny ideas to the table."
Kellams: It's going to be screened at Filmland, which is in Little Rock. This was filmed in Little Rock, also set in Little Rock. You don't have to set a film in the place where it's shot.
Hartigan: No, but I really prefer to, if possible. And in this case, Little Rock was a production location before it was a script location. The script was originally written for New Orleans. When we were trying to put it together, one of the jobs a producer has is trying to find the way to put the movie together most advantageously, and different states have different incentives to try and offer to get films to come shoot there. Arkansas had a competitive one for us, and our script really only needed to take place in any state that has restrictive abortion laws for the sake of the story.
So Arkansas fit, and I really loved that it was a place that hasn't been shot to death. It's not like Atlanta. It's not like Vancouver or all these places where productions almost always go. And I had never been myself. So I was like, I would love to have a new experience and see if there's something intangible about this city that hasn't been captured before, that maybe we could be the first to capture in a cool way.
Then we decided we would shoot here, and then I immediately made the next decision to have it set here, because I think you're robbing yourself of the opportunity of mining a city for what's unique about it and what's cool about it if you're having to cheat and hide. I'd rather just free myself of any limitations and open myself up to absorbing whatever is unique about a place."
Kellams: As you mentioned, reproductive choices are at the heart of this film, and what's interesting and refreshing is that different characters have different viewpoints and they're allowed to enunciate them. This will make you laugh, but it will also make you think.
Hartigan: Yeah. I mean, that's the goal. And it's set in the real world and it's about real-world consequences for actions. And it's about hopefully people making grounded real-life decisions based on a sort of outlandish premise.
And yeah, it was important to me — I think the most work that I personally did with the screenwriter, once I became attached as a director, was working on the Jenny character and trying to make her feel as real and interesting as possible. She's a character that you don't see very often portrayed in films. And if that kind of character is portrayed in films, it's usually done with a little bit of condescension. We wanted to make her feel like an interesting and well-rounded person who just makes decisions that other people might not agree with."
Kellams: Chad, congratulations on the film. Thanks so much for talking with us.
Hartigan: Thank you for having me."
Kellams: Chad Hartigan directed the new film The Threesome. It was filmed in and is set in Little Rock. A preview screening takes place Thursday night at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock. It's part of Filmland 2025. A complete Filmland schedule can be found at arkansascinemasociety.org. The Threesome will open in theaters nationally Sept. 5. We spoke yesterday by Zoom.
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